Kona2 and ability to do Uncompressed HD

[Andy Edwards]

Bob….

Do you happen to know how loud the sound level on the 5 bay Fusion Box?

Do you happen to know what the max length of the Port Multiplier cables can be?

Andy Edwards
AE Digital TV
Las Vegas

[Andy Edwards]

[Ramona Howard] “the renders can be dumped onto the RAID protected array”

Ramona,

What are you using for your controller card to get the raid protection?

Or are you doing it via software raid?

Andy Edwards
AE Digital TV
Las Vegas

[Bob Zelin]

the Fusion 500P is SILENT, and so is the promax port multiplier chassis – they are quiteter than the MAC G5. They make no noise. (yes, there are cooling fans). The cable is a standard legnth (SHORT) eSATA to eSATA cable, that I believe cannot be extended. Most people keep the drive ontop of the G5 or just to the side of it (if there are multiple units.

Bob Zelin

[Andy Edwards]

Thanks for the confirmation Bob. I just wondered if two 5 drive box set would be loud when editing.

Andy

[Bob Zelin]

Everyone here is correct – SATA is cheap, and it is intriging because of this (and I use it all the time), but there is no RAID protection like from companies like Medea and HUGE Systems. Both companies offer RAID 3 protection, and both products are excellent (and more expensive). In contrast to this, I just received a call (Sunday 7/9/06) from WFTV in Orlando – their Apple XServe RAID (raid 5) lost a drive, and it will not do the rebuild with the replacement drive. SO – if you have more money to spend, stick with companies like HUGE and MEdea.

Bob Zelin

[Ken Hon]

Andy,

The normal cable length for eSATA (the kind of cables used with port multipliers) is 1m but the eSATA spec supports cables up to 2m evidently. I’ve never tried those though, just 1 m. We have 2 ProMax 5 drive arrays using Hitachi 500 Mb drives and our G5 quad is much noisier than the arrays. They are certainly way quieter than our older SCSI drive arrays. All 10 drives striped together as Raid 0 gives us read write speeds slightly in excess of 450 MB/sec and 370 MB/sec using the Kona Drive test. I suggest testing each drive individually and formating them individually prior to the raid as we found 1 drive that was occasionally dropping in speed and it was causing problems in the array (erratic drops in the r/w speed). You can also make yourself a 20GB or so file and copy it back and forth to the array and use the checksum utility to make sure you are getting bit for bit accuracy. These drives work very well though. Also be sure the Sonnet card only goes in a 4x slot if you have PCI-e.

Aloha,

Ken

[Moody Glasgow]

We had a string of bad luck once where 2 seperate drives went down in the span of 2 weeks. It was the first time I realized how important protected storage was.
Ever since then, when asked if we should spend the extra money for that little bit of protection, the answer will always be yes.

moody glasgow
smoke artist / editor

[Oliver Peters]

Some alternate suggestions ….

If you want bullet-proof and mission-critical, look at Facilis and 1st Design (1 Beyond). For back-up, instead of FW800, look at the Rev PRO systems from GV. 35GB to a cartridge (rated for 30 years) and there’s an 7-cartridge Autoloader drive as well. Drives connect via USB2 or FW400.

Sincerely,
Oliver

Oliver Peters
Post-Production & Interactive Media
Orlando, FL
http://www.oliverpeters.com

[Walter Biscardi]

[Oliver Peters] “For back-up, instead of FW800, look at the Rev PRO systems from GV. 35GB to a cartridge (rated for 30 years) and there’s an 7-cartridge Autoloader drive as well. Drives connect via USB2 or FW400.”

35GB cartridges aren’t going to do me much good when I have at least 1TB to back up at any one time. When I say backup, I simply mean immediate backup. Long term storage is done on removeable SATA drives if the client wants that. For short term, project based backup, a 500GB – 1TB Firewire drive works perfectly.

Walter Biscardi, Jr.
https://www.biscardicreative.com

“I reject your reality and substitute my own!” – Adam Savage, Mythbusters

[Oliver Peters]

[walter biscardi] “35GB cartridges aren’t going to do me much good when I have at least 1TB to back up at any one time. “

I would tend to agree, but I’m of the school that camera tapes are still a better archive. The 35GB cartridges seem viable for all the non-TC based material. I work with one place that tries to use FW drives loaded with B-Roll footage for continuing ongoing projects. They are starting to find that juggling storage is actually just as cumbersome as simply recapturing from edited selects reels. Hence the value of solid, true RAID-protected shared storage for this type of work. … But that’s a different topic.

Sincerely,
Oliver

Oliver Peters
Post-Production & Interactive Media
Orlando, FL
http://www.oliverpeters.com